Fiji

Late March, early April is off season for tourists in this South Pacific Island for a singular reason; the weather is unpredictable, passing from the rainy season to the more desirable, or at least most expensive, days of un-interrupted sun. So a good time to be here, with fewer tourists and only a few brief but welcome, bursts of rain which take place normally in the evening hours or during the night. We had arrived from Auckland on a quick Air New Zealand flight that took us into Nadi airport on the main island of Fiji, Viti Levu, and then on by Taxi to a resort hotel in Denarau, a stepping stone before moving out to one of the smaller Islands in the South Pacific Ocean by ferry.

The taxi driver gave us our first Fijian history lesson being a fourth generation resident of Indian decent. This community is the second most populous section of society making up 38% of the population, arriving after 1879 as indentured laborers to work on sugar plantations to replace the existing slave workers. In the period between 1879 and 1916 over sixty thousand were brought over from India and most never left, changing forever the social fabric of these islands. The early laborers suffered harsh conditions and I suspect realized in time that theirs was simply a different kind of slavery, working long hours in formidable heat. Eventually they became landowners themselves, integrated into the islands culture and created businesses but it wasn’t until the early 1960’s before they gained representation in Parliament, still today the relationship between the Indigenous people of Fiji and the Indians is not harmonious. Our driver talked rapidly and proudly about his home, showering us with facts including one often repeated – there are 333 Islands in Fiji but only about a third are populated. Eventually, with some urging, he talked about his frustration over the political inequality. He also mentioned his fears of the Chinese entrepreneurs who build large commercial buildings without any sensitivity to the landscape, an almost universal fear of the Chinese was heard throughout the Southern hemisphere on our travels. Our short drive that had started with optimism had, I fear thanks to my questioning, made him a little withdrawn by the time we arrived.

Our hotel in Denarau was a little nondescript, a generic Hilton, furnished in the 1970’s and could have existed anywhere in the world. Fortunately it was for only one night and we took advantage of its location on the edge of the Ocean and ate outside….I walked around the property and into the neat and clean gated community surrounding the international Hotel brands. We had been warned by our driver about the multi million dollar homes which smugly peeped at us from between the thick vegetation on the narrow side walk, most had yachts docked on the canal at the foot of their properties.

The ferry took us out into a still Ocean and within about a half and hour we saw the first of many low lying Islands, I was struck by the contrast of the green of the land and the emerald purity of the water, the tranquility of the sea. It was a view I had seen many times before, we all have, it’s on our screen savers, a backdrop to commercials and movies becoming something beyond itself. Yet remarkably many of the other passers were absorbed on their phones while passing these volcalic islands, a place where ultramarine meets aquamarine, it took a moment to realize that one of the key pastimes in a resort like this was observing, usually critically, the other guests.

We made one stop before reaching our own Island resort, Tokoriki, to drop off and pick up those using a beach club on one of the smaller islands. Looking down into the water as we slowed and docked the ferry, I was awestruck with its clarity, for an absurd moment it seemed possible to reach down and drink it, but to observe the finest details on the reef, the radically shaped corals as well as schools of fish, their luminosity was overwhelming and beyond anything I’d seen underwater before or imagined existed.

There is a moment of theater, or perhaps comedy, when arriving at Tokoriki. We were met from the small dingy (trousers rolled up inelegantly, sandals in hand to cover the last few wet steps onto the sand) by the staff of the hotel on the beach, one of them dressed in the costume of the indigenous peoples, a dress made out of grass, holding a spear and large conch shell. For the petite, almost skeletal, Chinese girls it was a selfie opportunity not to be missed, and we looked on with complex feelings, something between contempt and envy at the pale translucence of their skin, their youth and innocence, but mainly the shameless narcissism. These apprehensions would assert themselves throughout our trip with Asian, American and European tourists apparently obsessed with their own image; multiple costume changes, videos taken from cameras or phones with the an empty beach or garish sunset as an only partially credible backdrop. One aspect of our arrival was authentic however, the welcome songs from the staff with lovely, sophisticated harmonizing which possessed heartfelt conviction, although towards what aim? we could only guess.

The days on the Island resort took on a pleasingly formulaic pattern; decisions about where to eat, whether to snorkel, sunbath, hike or read in the shade…..and it was the time in the Sea that gave us most meaning. From the beach we could walk and swim out to the reef, less than a hundred meters away, and there dive deep into the waters to get momentarily lost in the labyrinth of its ecosystem. On one occasion Mary tugged at me to see something which turned out to be (I found later) a reef shark passing us with indifference. In the rocks were startling, Yves Klein blue starfish and voluptuous corals looking healthy and unbleached; alive. But all this came at a cost if the timing of the dive was wrong, you had no alternative but to climb out of the water in low tide when the corals cut your feet, a lesson quickly learned and not repeated.

One day we took a boat with another couple and their child to a nearby Island, Modriki, whose moment of fame came from being the location used in Tom Hanks film Castaway. We took the opportunity to snorkel in deeper open water and enjoy the Oceans quiet. Before that I asked the main guide about shark attacks, a mild concern for those of us from the Spielberg generation, and he told us of several encounters while spearfishing from the main island, the sharks being more interested in the fish caught and held around his waist, bleeding into the water. But it is the barracudas that he fears most and so he carries a menacing diving knife which he claims has been used in self defense on several occasions although quietly I remained skeptical, speculating on how many of these apocryphal tales have been told to wide eyed and slightly fearful tourists like myself.

It was hard not to be intrigued by the all Fijian staff, by their natural beauty and by a certain androgyny or at least lack of machismo in some of the men, who wore flowers behind their ears, an old tradition, spoke gently and moved elegantly between our dining tables. The people of Fiji have existed for over 3,500 years, their earliest ancestors originating from Asia, what we call Taiwan today and Southern China. But their world was transformed 250 years ago with the arrival of the first Europeans, disrupting and transforming thousands of years of their civilization and so it’s impossible to ignore the trauma that Fijians have experienced in this time. The additional arrival of Indian immigrants has already been mentioned, but it is the arrival of disease that mostly impacted their lives, with the majority of the islands inhabitants being wiped out by germs rather than through fighting.

It was the arrival of the nineteenth century Europeans which must had terrified the people of Fiji in the early 1800’s. There is one character in particular that personifies the savagery that took place in those times, a Scandinavian adrift in the Southern hemisphere, appropriately it turns out, named Charlie Savage although his real name is likely to have been Kalle Svensson. Shipwrecked off Fiji, he came onto the Island with the rest of the crew, except one who died in the wreck, and with sufficient weaponry to impress the locals. The destiny of his surviving shipmates has been lost to time, or more accurately it is dependent on the frustrating unreliability of oral histories, in all likelihood they were killed and eaten, cannibalism being a common fate in those days. This brutal act was consequential, the sailors having a grim revenge in their afterlives delivering the first of many microbes that over time would devastate their murderers. At this time a ship of sailors would likely harbor syphilis, gonorrhea, tuberculosis and influenza but it was measles, contracted by a self proclaimed king who visited Sydney, that originated the first major pandemic in 1875, killing a quarter of the population.

Savage was able to persuade the chiefs of his value as a warrior and the superiority of guns over clubs so was spared as a war time asset. There one story frequently repeated about Savage; he took a canoe upriver to a village massacring most of the unarmed locals utilizing his musket so ruthlessly that the few survivors used the dead bodies as a shield as the river turned crimson with blood. So if you, like me, are believer in cross generation trauma, it is hard not to look at the hotel staff in wonder at their resilience surviving weaponry, disease and cruelty. This notion of the South Sean Islands being a haven of peace and innocence prior to the arrival of the Europeans has been the stuff of urban legends for centuries. The French painter Paul Gauguin, hearing whispers in Parisian bars from returning seamen of a place of endless sunshine and of the loving, carefree nature of the women living there, persuaded him to move to the neighboring Island of Tahiti. The truth is a little harder to bear, these islands were in a constant state of warfare and the battles were brutal, should you be on the losing side you would not be expected to survive.

We gained more insight into the lives of the hotel staff when taking a fifteen minute hike over the hill to a remote “hidden” beach on the other side of the Island. To access to the path it was necessary to go past the staff quarters, small squalid mobile homes, where they hang out with beers in the yard. It was a little voyeuristic seeing them like this, out of uniform in jeans and teeshirts, and both sides a little embarrassed by the unexpected encounter, the unsaid disparity in our circumstances. Once the hill had been crossed there were a couple of shanty dwellings, made from found scrap materials, surely frail and vulnerable to even the mildest of storms that might pass. They were inhabited by locals it was our first real contact with Fijians that were not in the tourist business, who smiled at us patiently, were tolerant of our interest in the meal they were cooking with smoke coming from the underground oven but I felt were glad to see us go.

We did leave the Island, after ten days of excellent food, weather and hospitality. On the boat journey back to mainland, crammed with the other guests, again the selfies and the posing – a perfectly calibrated version of their holiday to be shared with the hundreds (thousands?) of on line followers. Yet I was being too hard on them, there is a difference between traveling and vacationing, the latter is about switching off your mind while the former is the opposite; to absorb the details, be aware of the lack of parity between ourselves and the locals in terms of our wants, cultures, lifestyles, and then to leave with the dispiriting realization of the asymmetry in our level of happiness.